WaveWalker's Secret
by SilverMarine
Summary: Dark times are lurking on the horizon for Tortall. And at the same time, Nicole, a girl from our world, is mysteriously transported to Tortall...only the WaveWalker knows that she is the only hope for Tortall's future.
1. Pride Comes Before The Fall

Nicole sat on the bench, twisting the sparkling gauzy material of her skirt anxiously as Annabelle Chen pirouetted on the ice and went into a beautiful spin. The girl was simply too good for her own good, and she had a head the size of Texas with that knowledge. Not to mention she was far more beautiful than Nicole, who was, in her opinion, scrawny and far too tall, with limp, boring brown hair and a multitude of freckles scattered across a nose that was a bit too big. Her eyes, blue-grey with a touch of silver, were the only feature she liked about herself. In her mother's opinion, as was to be expected, Nicole was a beautiful teenager, the perfect child, if a bit too inclined to worry over small things.  
  
Of course, Annabelle Chen had the silky, long black hair suited to a Chinese-Korean girl, as well as the almond shaped, dark eyes and the creamy skin, as well as a beautiful smile. She whirled around the ice and ended with a dramatic pose, slender arms arched gracefully over her head. Nicole sighed in envy. Annabelle never jerked in her poses, unless that was what was required for the routine, and she never wobbled or fell. Nicole didn't think she'd ever seen Annabelle fall in the whole six years they'd been in the same skating group, except for the one time she'd had a broken toe from it being stepped on in a movie theatre.  
  
The announcement came over the loudspeaker as the judges announced Annabelle's score. It averaged out to 9.6, a very tough score to beat. The crowd applauded wildly, and Nicole looked up to see a group of boys about her age giving Annabelle a standing ovation, whooping and waving their fists.  
  
"Our next contestant.Nicole Barkovitch, from New Janrie Skating Club." Nicole took a deep breath and stood up, fixing her prize in her mind. If she got over 9 as a score, her mother would buy her the final book in the Protector of the Small series, Lady Knight. If she could just make 9.1, she would be able to discover the final tale of Kel's knighthood.  
  
Annabelle glided off the ice, giving Nicole a smirk as the latter stepped onto the rink. Skating out into the middle, Nicole clenched her teeth and tried to forget it. Lady Knight, Lady Knight, she chanted furiously in her head.  
  
The music started, a low, breathy tune that suited Nicole's dark purple and black costume. She was performing a particularly hard routine, a sorrowful story of a woman whose love had been killed in a train accident, she thought. It was hard to remember. She spun into the first move, but caught a glimpse of those cute boys in the audience, watching her with very bored looks. Her concentration wavered just a bit, and she wobbled in her turn, throwing out an arm to regain her balance. As she righted herself and tried to figure out where she was in the song, she spied Annabelle in the audience, watching her with a look that could only be described as mock pity masking a look of triumph. Annabelle was right, though. After that wobble, she'd be lucky to get an 8.7 for a score.  
  
With this troublesome thought in her head, Nicole's concentration wavered once more, and this time, it fell. It brought Nicole down with it. She toppled over, landing hard on her side with her left leg twisted under her in a most unnatural pose. Everything seemed to go in slow motion. The ice rink whirled lazily around her, and the blur of the audience stood up, deep, sluggish voices making sounds of pity and surprise. The room seemed to darken, and Nicole fell into a welcoming pit of unconsciousness.  
  
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Two weeks later, Nicole could be found in a hospital bed, her broken left leg in a thick cast, covered in signatures and happy faces, suspended from the roof. A smaller cast was wound around her arm, which had been fractured slightly in her fall. Her book, The Realms of the Gods, which she was reading for the seventh time now, had fallen open on her chest. She just couldn't find the strength or the interest, for that matter, to continue reading the story, even though she had stopped at the chapter where Daine had fallen off the cliff and was currently stuck in a spidren's web. She stared at the cover listlessly, at Daine's cocky pose as she stared defiantly at the huge blue dragon in front of her. Even someone trapped in the Dragonlands facing possible death had more options than she.  
  
"Why do I have to be like this?" Nicole demanded of Daine, who of course, didn't answer. Furious, she picked up the paperback and flung it across the room, where it hit a vase overflowing with flowers and fell to the ground, not failing to knock the vase off the table and shatter it. Nicole didn't care. Nothing mattered. She didn't care about anything.  
  
She turned over in bed, or at least attempted to, but the cast hanging from the roof shattered her effort. Growling in a feverish fury, she shut her eyes tight and tried to fall asleep, completely unaware of a strange coppery glow mixed with violet that was emitting itself from her body. 


	2. Violet Orbs

Chapter 2: Violet Orbs  
  
".never seen such a strange-looking child. Look at her clothes!"  
  
Nicole awoke groggily, eyes refusing to open properly. The voice she had just heard was gone, and for a moment Nicole thought that had all been just some odd dream, but when her eyes finally fluttered open, the first thing she saw was a pair of violet orbs floating in front of her vision. Nicole gasped in fright and tried to scramble away from the orbs, but an iron grip on her left leg stopped her from going anywhere. The orbs receded, and a nose appeared in her line of vision. Next came a mouth, then a mane of fiery red hair. The head turned to face something outside of Nicole's sight, and said something that she strained to understand.  
  
"We'd better take her to my father, or Numair, or someone like that." The name Numair registered itself in Nicole's mind, but she couldn't get a grip on where she'd heard it before. A TV show, maybe?  
  
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Nicole was barely aware that she had been picked up and was being carried swiftly towards a structure that could be called a castle, but was better defined as a fortress. Waiting at the gates was a very tall, lanky man with black hair secured by a hair-tie, and a slender woman of about twenty-five, with curly brown hair tied into a bun. The woman looked rather like she had been slender once, but her stomach had swelled to the size of a beach ball. Nicole vaguely registered that she must be pregnant, and very close to her time, but she didn't reflect more on this. The lanky man helped carry Nicole into the main part of the fortress, and Nicole drifted back to sleep.  
  
When Nicole next awoke, she was lying on something very soft. At first thinking she was back in the hospital and that the weird orbs had been a dream, she sat up awkwardly, and realized she couldn't be in the hospital because her leg was on the bed, not suspended from the ceiling. She peered around the room curiously. Tapestries covered the stone walls and rugs the floor. She didn't have time to examine further, because the door opened and three very harried people strode in.  
  
The first was a young man in his twenties, with astonishing green eyes (A/N I hope this is the right description.I haven't read POTS in a long time, so I can't remember what Neal or Duke Baird.or Yuki.look like). He was followed by a man that was his spitting image, although much older, in his fifties at least. The final person was a beautiful young woman with the slanting eyes of a Japanese person, and Nicole was uncomfortably reminded of Annabelle.  
  
The young man leaned over Nicole's leg, poking at the cast curiously, while his older mirror image looked at Nicole's face. The Japanese woman hovered anxiously in the background.  
  
"Father, can you make anything of this? I suppose it's here to hold the bones in her leg together, like a splint, but why use so much of this.rock- type thing?" The young man glanced at the older, a quizzical look on his face.  
  
The older man poked at the cast the way his son had and shrugged. "What I wish to know is how it - and she - got here. Alanna and George just found her on the beach, right, Neal?"  
  
Neal nodded. "Lady Alanna and Baron George couldn't make anything of it either."  
  
Annoyed, Nicole sat up. "Would you please stop talking about me as if I wasn't here?"  
  
Neal and his father looked at her in amazement. "What a strange accent! Where have you come from?"  
  
"Canada." Nicole said hesitantly, making it sound like a question rather than a statement.  
  
"Canada?" Neal said, pronouncing it slowly. "That's not a country I've ever heard of, and we were made to study plenty of geography as pages. Do you know where you are?"  
  
"Should I?" Nicole asked curiously. "Because I don't."  
  
Neal and his father exchanged a look, and then Neal looked at the pretty Japanese woman. "Perhaps you'd better leave, Yuki. This probably won't interest you."  
  
The woman he had called Yuki laughed. "Honestly, Neal. You think nothing will interest me. This is all quite fascinating. Child, you are in Tortall. Pirate's Swoop, to be exact. I am Yukimi noh Daiomoru, known as Yuki to most. This young man is Nealan of Queenscove, my husband, and this is His Grace, Duke Baird of Queenscove."  
  
The names all clicked in Nicole's mind, and she woke up fully. "Tortall? Pirate's Swoop? And.Neal, and Duke Baird, and Yuki? This has to be a dream. This so has to be a dream." She pinched herself and yelped. "Ow!"  
  
"Child, this isn't a dream, and we're just as confused as you are." Duke Baird replied. "Numair and Myles should be here soon, and they can talk to you about it."  
  
(A/N I know, very boring chapter, but a more interesting one will come soon. I had to get all the boring talking out first.) 


	3. Fortune, Fate, and Prophecies

Chapter 3: Fortune, Fate, And Prophecies  
  
The door suddenly swung open, and five more people strode into the room, making it incredibly crowded, as it wasn't a large room. Three of the people were the lanky man, the redhead, and the pregnant woman that Nicole had seen earlier. The other two, an older man with very shaggy hair and a man that would have been handsome if not for his overlarge nose, were unfamiliar to her.  
  
The redhead sat down on Nicole's bed and looked at her cast. "Baird, why haven't you healed this yet? The girl must be in the gods only know how much pain."  
  
"Actually, I'm not in much pain," Nicole said, a little shyly, for she knew who this must be, "but I would like this cast off and the leg healed, if you can."  
  
The redhead looked at everyone irritably. "George, Daine, Yuki, I don't think you should stay here. The room's crowded enough as it is." Looking annoyed, the man with the large nose, the beautiful Japan - no; she must be Yamani - woman, and the pretty woman with child, left the room sullenly.  
  
The redhead looked at Nicole. "Now, then. I am - "  
  
"Alanna of Pirate's Swoop and Olau. I know who you are."  
  
Alanna frowned. "Really? And how would you know that?"  
  
"I've read all about you in a series called Song of the Lioness. It was written by Tamora Pierce - she's an American author in my world. You're married to Baron George Cooper of Pirate's Swoop, and you have three children - Thom, Alan, and Alianne. You disguised yourself as a boy and went to the palace to train as a page when you were ten." Nicole proceeded to recite a shortened version of Alanna's life, finishing with the ongoing Scanran war. "I don't know much about what happened during the past nine years in your life. Those books were centred around Lady Keladry of Mindelan, mostly, and it didn't say much about you."  
  
Alanna stared open-mouthed at Nicole. For once, she was at a complete loss for words. She knew most people knew a lot about her life, since she was famous in most of the Eastern and Southern lands, but what was the girl saying about this 'series'? "You say you're from another world?"  
  
"Yeah. It's called Earth. I got transported here.somehow.after I fell in a skating competition and broke my leg. I don't know how exactly I broke my leg, because you don't generally break something that big in a little fall, but anyway."  
  
Alanna frowned, but without another word, laid her hand on Nicole's leg. Her hand began to glow with violet fire, and Nicole felt a strange coolness drifting through her leg. Alanna pulled her hand away and pulled out a belt knife. She stuck it deep in the plaster cast and began to saw away grimly at it. As she did so, the very lanky man sat down in a chair by Nicole's bed.  
  
"If you know who Alanna is, then I suppose you must know who I am," he said calmly.  
  
Nicole nodded. "You're the mage Numair Salmalin. A black robe mage. And that young woman that left earlier was Daine Sarrasri, your lover. And apparently, the mother of your child," she added, with a smile. Daine had always been her favourite character.  
  
Numair nodded, not the least bit fazed that she knew him and Daine too. "Now, Sir Myles and I - I'm sure you know who he is - have been trying to figure out how you got here for the last hour. We found an old prophecy in the palace library that may turn up some clues, but we don't know if it does without knowing the exact details of how you got here." He handed her a faded piece of parchment.  
  
In Tortall's gravest time of need, The one to save, the one to seek, Will stumble 'pon this hopeless land. And fate will fall out from her hand.  
  
Child from a distant world Out of time and space is hurled Guided by a goddess's hand Great things for her to do are planned.  
  
A sending of ill luck and fate Posing in the form of skates Finally she comes to save The land in which good luck has caved.  
  
Numair let her read it a few times, and then asked, "Does it make sense?"  
  
Nicole nodded, and then told him a fully detailed story of how she'd come to be here. Numair listened, nodding his head a few times, and then said, "Well, all I can conclude is that you were sent here to save Tortall, when not even people like the Lioness or the Protector of the Small can do it. The question is, when is that?" 


End file.
